Pre-school English Workshop

From the attendees' point of view!

Where's Mel?

As mentors, we enjoyed the event enormously. First of all, even though we are all experienced in English language education for young learners, it is always possible to learn more in your chosen field, and I definitely felt as though this workshop increased my knowledge of teaching and learning foundation phonics. Secondly, it was wonderful to have someone else doing all the hard work! Especially when the 'someone else' is a well prepared group of experts who are also your friends. So, thank you to the Bera cluster for bringing this event to Jerantut.

But how about the participating teachers? How did they feel about the workshop? The workshop organisers have published their before and after survey results on the Bera cluster blog, and you can see the feedback results for yourself HERE 

During the morning and afternoon tea breaks, I spoke to two participating teachers about the event; Mme Subathira A/P Chelempah from SJKT Jerantut and Mme Norhidayah Bt Baharum from SK Tekam Utara. Both participants are pre-school teachers.

Participating pre-school teachers
Norhidayah Bt Baharum (l) and Subathira A/P Chelempah (r)

Teacher Norhidayah said that she had often used alphabet songs to teach her classes English phonics, but she had not used the accompanying gestures which Tara demonstrated. Norhidayah said that she usually used flash cards to accompany the sounds, but in future she would try the gestures as well. She also acknowledged that it is difficult to teach children how to make the sounds of English and she said that the techniques we had learnt during the morning sessions would definitely help her pupils' pronunciation. One of the activities that Norhidayah will definitely be taking back to her pre-school classes was the listen and write activity for vowels that Tara demonstrated with post it stickers. We each had five stickers and as the 'teacher' made the phonic sound we wrote down the corresponding letter on a post it note. This makes it very clear to the teacher which of the English vowel sounds are still problematic for her pupils.

Another teacher, Subathira, was also familiar with a variety of alphabet songs. As well as using gestures to accompany each phonic sound in future classes, she will also try and avoid using direct translations in the classroom, as it is not good for pupils to rely on teacher translation all the time, Suba said that another important thing she had learned from the workshop was the system of focusing on vowels first (rather than just running through the whole 'abc'), and then segmenting the learning into different consonant sets, paying special attention to the importance of separating visually similar letters like 'p' and 'b' which can be confusing for very young learners. Suba also complemented the presenters for their thoroughness; not rushing through the material and taking teachers through early learner phonics strategies step-by-step.

Stephen-Peter Jinks (ELC Jerantut)